What is Food Justice?

the beliefthat all people have a rightto safe, adequate, and nutritious food regardless of economic constraints or social inequalities.

Spotlight: Adams County Food Policy Council

The Adams County Food Policy Council aims to partner with community, business, agriculture and government to develop food policy and action, while promoting the integration of the individual, community, economy and environment for health and sustainability. Its goals are to increase access to nutritious and affordable food, to strengthen the local economy by supporting and promoting local farmers and businesses, to improve health by addressing food-related diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, to provide information about food system issues in Adams County, to foster partnerships to promote education, food assessment, and action, and to influence policy to ensure that food production, distribution, and consumption are beneficial to the health of the community.

Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way we Feed our Children

Millions of kids every day eat lunch, and sometimes breakfast, at school. Yet the U.S. Department of Agriculture invests only $2.68 on average per day for each student’s school lunch. We say that children are our future. But what are we feeding our kids? What are we teaching them about the relationship between food and health? Our system is broken and we are growing a generation of Americans who think healthy food is cheap food, and who don't have the skills to make better decisions about what they eat.

Chef Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services in the Berkeley Unified School District, is on a mission to change the way we dish out school lunches and revolutionize the way we think about food, health, and the environment. Watch her TED talk below:

Framing Food as a Public Issue

Until very recently, most Americans were not considering how our everyday food was impacting our society, the economy, and the environment. With less than 1% of the US Population involved in farming and agricultural production, we simply did not concern ourselves with where our food was coming from and why we should care. Furthermore, common misconceptions about the rising obesity epidemic led most people to assume that food was an issue of personal choice, and had nothing to do with public policy or social justice. These issues and more led to a study conducted by the Frameworks Institute in 2008 about the public's knowledge about and response to our modern food system. This fascinating interactive e-workshop explains their findings:

"Food justice is everyone having enough to eat; healthy food for our children; food that doesn’t contain harmful things that we don’t know about; freedom to grow our own food; ability to buy food directly from farmers; fair wages for those who grow, cook and work with food." —Urban & Environmental Policy Institute